A Study in Magic - Deleted Scene
by Artemis Rayne
Summary: Sherlock had never felt so utterly helpless - not even as he had faced down Moriarty in that darkened swimming pool, bombs strapped to his best friend's chest and red lights dancing across their skin - because when it came to battling wizards, all his wit and deductions could do nothing to stop John's screams. *A deleted scene from my Auror!John casefic "A Study in Magic."*


A/N: Despite the unreasonable length of "A Study in Magic," there was still a considerable amount of the story that ended up on the cutting room floor. If my muse had its way, he'd have written the story all the way through, as a pair of full-length novels; one from John's POV and one from Sherlock's. For the most part, the bits that got cut out were unnecessary world-building and character-centric drivvle.

However, one of the scenes I was sad to take out was Sherlock's side of what happened at Whitehawk manor. Therefore, I took the little snippet I'd initially written and scrapped, polished and expanded it a bit, and here you go.

Needless to say, this will make ZERO sense if you've not read "A Study in Magic."

* * *

The screams echoed up the staircase, reverberating off the stone walls until they were everywhere. _John_. Sherlock's mind knew it, even as something in him - sentiment, perhaps - fought to reject the information. John Watson did not scream. John was calm and collected in the face of a crisis, a hardened soldier who had lived through the sort of things that would have destroyed other men. He was not the type of person who screamed.

Yet the sound bounced up around them again, and there was no escaping the truth.

Ahead of him, Sherlock saw the faint ripple in the air where the man called Potter was moving cautiously down the steps. He knew Potter was carrying his wand, outstretched and ready, and it still felt wholly insufficient. _A stick_ , the logical voice in the back of his head crooned. _What good is a silly little stick?_

But Sherlock knew the answer to that question as well, whether his mind wanted to accept it or not. He had seen what those sticks could do. It had been a stick - _wand_ \- that incapacitated John. A wand that had immobilised Sherlock and flayed his skin open without ever making contact. It had also been a wand that had sewed his skin back together; had wiped away the pain of his currently mutilated leg so he could walk on it even though the muscles were contorted in ways that should have him unconscious on the ground.

It was very likely that it was a wand forcing those agonised noises from John's mouth.

Sherlock had never felt so utterly helpless. Not even as he had faced down Moriarty in that darkened swimming pool, bombs strapped to his best friend's chest and red lights dancing across their skin that promised quick deaths if they were uncooperative. Moriarty, for all his madness and power, was still human. There was nothing he possessed that Sherlock could not also attain if he so wished.

These men - Whitehawk and Potter and _John_ \- were something else entirely.

They were approaching the bottom of the stairs, John's continued, breathless screams drawing them down like a siren's song. Sherlock abandoned his walking stick, laying it down quietly to avoid giving away their presence. When he straightened again, he had to keep one hand against the wall to steady himself, and he struggled to catch up with the wizard who had gotten several steps ahead of him.

Potter had barely stepped down off the stairs when a brilliantly red light struck him, causing his wand to jerk out of his hand and clatter against the wall. The enchantment that had made his skin translucent began to fade, colour dripping down over him like spilt paint, and Potter held out his empty palms in surrender. Sherlock tucked himself back into the shadows made by the curve of the stairs just as his own figure gradually reappeared.

"Did you really think I would let someone just walk into my house without my knowing?" the other man - Whitehawk - drawled condescendingly. "Avabella warned me the moment the front door opened." He tipped his head at the far wall, and on any other occasion Sherlock would've been startled when the woman in the painting returned the nod, but for the moment he couldn't care. His eyes had fallen onto the room's only other occupant, and bile surged hot and acidic in his gut.

John was tied upright in a wooden chair, bound arm and foot. He had been stripped out of his jumper, and his undershirt was stained with sweat and blood. His forearm was a mottled mix of red and white, swollen and inflamed, and stripes of scarlet dribbled from the corner of his mouth. It seemed to be requiring all of his effort to keep his head from sagging against his chest, and even more so to squint his eyes open.

Rage boiled up in him, and Sherlock's free hand drifted to the small of his back; John's army-issued Browning was a comforting weight where it settled in the waistband of his trousers. He had no idea what good it would do against a wizard, but it was better than going in empty-handed.

Whitehawk directed his wand at John again. " _Astringio_." Sherlock barely caught the quiet word under the sound of John's pained gasp, and his brain scrambled for conjectured meanings in the Latin root words.

 _\- Astringio = astringo or adstringo; to bind or compress -_

Potter stepped forward to help, but Whitehawk turned the wand on him this time...

 _\- Incarcerous = incarcero; to jail or capture -_

...and then Potter was crumpled on the ground, bound in ropes that had appeared from thin air. Whitehawk turned his attention back to John, who had gone red in the face as he struggled to pull in breaths. There was a spark of panic in John's eyes and he gasped frantically, but whatever the wizard had done must have restricted the muscles in his torso because they would not flex.

In the back of his mind, Sherlock's brain was trying to rerun the numbers - calculating how many seconds John would last without oxygen, given his current breathing capabilities and factoring in an exponential increase of pressure - but he dismissed them without much thought. As Whitehawk dug his wand into the flesh beneath John's chin, Sherlock stepped carefully out of the shadows and drew the Browning.

John's unfocused gaze slid to him. "It's time to finish this," Whitehawk growled. The grating snap of bone struck Sherlock through to his core, but he didn't look away as John's lips quirked up ever so slightly in that familiar half-smile. And then he nodded.

"My thoughts precisely." In the back of his head, Sherlock heard a voice - one that sounded suspiciously like John - call him a _drama queen_ with a sort of resigned fondness, but all of his focus was narrowed to one point as he pulled the trigger. The gunshot was painfully loud in the small, stone room. Whitehawk shrieked and collapsed as his right knee spattered gore across the wall and floor. All of it rolled out in front of him like a series of photographs that Sherlock promptly shoved aside to evaluate later.

"John!" He dropped to his knees, letting the gun slip out of his hand, as he reached up for his best friend's sweat-drenched face. The red of John's skin had faded into a sickly pallor, and his lips had gone faintly blue. As John opened his mouth in an attempt to draw in more air, Sherlock saw that his tongue had seemingly adhered to the roof of his mouth. He touched John's chest with his other hand and felt the muscles vibrating with the strain of pushing back against the pressure that hadn't let go.

Another rib broke with a sharp crack, and John let out a strangled sound. Sherlock lunged at Whitehawk, who was curled on the floor and clutching his mangled knee. "Fix him!" he bellowed at the sobbing wizard. Whitehawk ignored him and, on the other side of the room, Potter was writhing against the ropes that still kept him bound.

Furious, Sherlock grabbed Whitehawk's leg and jammed his thumb into the mess of bone and muscle. Whitehawk screamed and kicked out with his other leg. "Stop this!" There was another snap, but this time, it wasn't bone; Sherlock glanced down and saw splintered wood in the place where Whitehawk's thrashing leg had last come down. His wand. Sherlock didn't know much about this world, but he had deduced that wizards did not do magic without their wands. A quick glance at Potter's horror-stricken expression confirmed his suspicions, and Sherlock's stomach plummeted.

Time seemed to slow as Sherlock's mind raced through the variables. Whitehawk no longer had a wand with which to reverse the spells he had cast. He might be able to use another, but Sherlock couldn't be sure that it worked that way. (The possessive way wizards treated their wands suggested some type of connection). Potter was still bound, and the time it would take to free him from the ropes was not time that they had to spare. John was no longer breathing at all, and when Sherlock looked over at him, there was blood spilling from his gaping mouth.

There was only one thing for it: Sherlock snatched up the abandoned gun, pressed it to Whitehawk's forehead, and fired.

John gagged and retched, tipping forward as his body reflexively tried to expel the blood clogging his airways. Sherlock spun to his side, breathless with relief. "John? _John_!" Sherlock tugged away the loose ropes on his wrists, freeing John's hands, but the doctor didn't move them. _Muscle fatigue, ataxia, loss of motor skills_. John's eyes had fallen shut, and if it weren't for his seizing abdomen, still trying to clear away the blood, he might've been still. "Stay awake, John."

Lashes fluttered, and John's eyes struggled to focus on him. The whites of his eyes were shot through with burst blood vessels. "Y'r 'live." The words bubbled off his lips in ribbons of tacky blood - _so much blood, too much blood, must be internal damage. Broken ribs might have punctured an organ; likely lungs, possibly heart. Dear God, don't let it be the heart..._

"Of course I am," Sherlock replied although he could barely hear himself over the pounding of his heart. He twisted to where Potter was fighting to extricate himself from the loosened coils of rope. "Do something!"

"I'm trying!" Potter shouted back, white with panic. He stumbled, one leg still tangled in the rope, toward his discarded wand. Above them, Sherlock could hear a thunder of footsteps as the reinforcements Potter had called for must finally be arriving.

 _Too late, too late... too late..._

John was babbling, unintelligible noises swallowed up by the blood that wouldn't stop filling his mouth. Sherlock cradled his face, skin frighteningly cold beneath the heat of blood, praying - _not praying, he doesn't believe in deities; he_ does _believe in John_ \- for him to hold on. "Sher..." John hissed out, and Sherlock tried to shush him. Voices, shouts, chaos in the stairwell, drawn to Potter's bellowed orders. John's gaze flicked up toward his face, a narrow strip of unfocused sapphire. "M'sorr..."

"John?" And then all at once, the tension flooded out of John's body like his strings had been cut, and he collapsed into Sherlock's arms. "John!" Spots of white danced at the edges of Sherlock's vision as he tried to keep John from sliding down off the chair, knowing that movement would only make the internal damage worse.

 _Too late, the damage is already done, you're too late, always too late..._

"John!"

"Sherlock." Someone was tugging at his arm, and something told him that he knew the owner, but Sherlock couldn't tear his focus away from the limp body against him. "Sherlock, get back! They can help!" There were hands, so many hands, reaching for John, grabbing him, pulling him away from Sherlock. The detective snarled, swinging out with one hand while the other cradled John protectively against him. Then, "I'm sorry. _Stupefy_."

Red light flared in the edges of his vision, and then everything vanished under a wave of black.


End file.
